G Mail Beta: my first thoughts... is it secure?!

Have Google gone mad?
Being a member of Blogger.com meant that I was one of the first million or so in the world to be offered access to the G-Mail service provided by Google. You may have read previous posts regarding it. I thought I would sign up and see if there was anything different to their offering. Let's face it, this is a competitive space and they need a differentiator. I think that Google believe the offer of 1Gb of space on their e-mail servers would be sufficient to bring the crowds flocking... I think there's a lot of work to do if they are going to catch up with free providers like Yahoo (who offer a calendar, briefcase, task list & address book as well as e-mail facilities).

Clarity, clarity, clarity
On further inspection, I can tell you that the user interface is pretty interesting, and they have given clutter a lot of thought. As you may well expect (or have even experienced), whether you have 100Mb of e-mail or even 100 e-mails life can get pretty cluttered. It's difficult to find things and web-based e-mail facilities don't often provide good searching or even filing capability. Google attempts to tackle this in several ways:

1. Conversation presentation style

E-mails are not e-mails, they are conversations. The idea is simple, but from a user interface perspective, very useful. All related e-mails on a thread are consolidated into a single conversation thread title (with the number of e-mails... sorry, snippets of conversation, listed by the side). If you are looking at a conversation then you are not far away from all the other contributions to that conversation. The snippets that you are not currently reading are collapsed to their briefest summary form.

2. Easy archiving; in-box clarity

E-mails can be placed into the archive. i.e. out of sight, out of mind, and most importantly, out of your inbox. If you are anything like me at work, and have to deal with tools as terrible as Lotus Notes, then you'll appreciate the ease at which you can remove the clutter. Of course, removing the clutter and "disappearing" your mail (sorry, conversations) means that you will need a really good way of retrieving those conversations later on. The best way to do this on such a filing system is to search for them, and for that you need a good, extremely fast search engine. It is a happy co-incidence that Google are providing this service!

3. Labelling

Another useful way to organise yourself with regards to mail is by labelling them... I am sure that all of this meta-data that is simple to apply enhances the way in which you can work with G-Mail. A label is simply a text field that you may wish to apply to an e-mail. G-Mail provides a nice list of your labels down on the left-hand side which shows you how many unread mails have been labelled. Clicking on a specific label takes you straight to the list of conversations that have been tagged with the moniker you just clicked. I think adding a single category (label) to an e-mail and making it simple to apply is extremely powerful. The current alternative offerings make it too difficult to apply this kind of meta-data, but it really is this meta-data the helps us keep organised. If it is too hard to add the meta-data then we don't do it and we stay in a pickle!

4. Filters

Filters are simply saved searches. This is similar to the nice feature in Outlook 2003 (not Outlook Express) where you create a search pattern and save it. This search pattern can then be used to provide a nice view on to all of your e-mail. For example, I want to find all of the e-mails about Longhorn that weren't sent to me by Microsoft and contain items about the WinFS functionality.

5. Stars in their E's

The final usability feature is the simple facility of marking something important. It purely is a mechanism for flagging something - whether it be because you want to read it later or it will remain important. This feature is not as good as that implemented by Outlook 2003 (for obvious reasons), but it is useful nonetheless. I just wish IBM would pull their fingers out and implement some of these usability featureson Lotus Notes! I am desperate for a follow-up function!

What about the adverts?
I understand that there's been a lot of press about privacy invasion and the use of Google tools to automatically generate targeted advertising on the mail service. I can fully understand the issue here, but I don't think I have much to hide from Google and I would be more concerned about hackers breaking into the service and getting at my data. The adversts are extremely unobtrusive and are displayed on the right-hand side of the screen when you are viewing your mails. They don't pop up, they don' flash and you don't really notice them unless you make a conscious effort to look at them.

Overall, I think that they have produced a very nice web-based e-mail client. I am sure that some of the features will be copied in future client software, and I love the ease at which I can "disappear" e-mails out of the way. Inbox management has never been so easy. I do recommend the package, but I suspect they are still working quite hard at the offering. For example, I noticed that only the logon page was secured via HTTPS. I notified Google, who got back to me and said they would look into applying HTTPS across the rest of the site (I don't want hackers, spammers, etc. sniffing my mail!). Later on that day (today in fact) I noticed that the HTTPS had been applied across the whole site. "Hooray!", I thought, " I am the man who helped make GMail more secure"... by the time I logged in again a few hours later, it had gone back to being HTTP only.

Obviously creating a service that will probably be used by millions takes a lot of testing - especially in the areas of security and scalability. I hope Google do well because they may have a chance to challenge Microsoft's dominance in some key technical areas. It's just a little odd that they are so late to the e-mail market with essentially a good offering that probably won't gain critical mass unless they continue down the path of innovation and address people's real needs.